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Comment by matt2000 | Hacker News Reader

matt2000

It seems like there might be a pretty straight up tradeoff between difficulty of developing software and quantity of software produced. So the more we attempt to optimize at a lower level, the more time it takes to develop, and the less software someone can make and maintain. So, given that - would you rather lose 30-40% of the apps you use and like, but the rest are faster? Or keep using everything you have now?

There are exceptions to this, as with everything, but it's not as easy as this article makes it sound, i.e. "Just make faster stuff dummy!" There's always a cost.

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That's just not true. In fact, we're losing 30%-40% of the software we use and like every single day simply because people write utter crap and then pointlessly rewrite it over and over. If we placed more focus on having sane development practices and good computer assists for developers, we'd ultimately find it easier to develop software and maintain it over time, such that there'd be little or no need to throw stuff away altogether.

We have cheap ubiquitous personal computers that can display streaming high definition video, with audio streams and subtitles, on a virtual screen inside a virtual reality - while multitasking and running other programs in the background. The hardware's plenty good enough for daily use.

The problem is that software practices have gotten so bad that a simple text messenger or email client uses at least as many resources as that program that's streaming HD video within a virtual reality, just to send or receive a few bytes of text now and then.

I'd be ok with losing 30-40% of the overbloated apps, because then they could be replaced with apps that don't need 2GB of dependencies to left-pad a string. We've really gone overboard on the "code reuse is great" and "don't reinvent the wheel" to the point that every program tries to include as much as possible of all code ever written and every wheel ever designed.

> would you rather lose 30-40% of the apps you use and like, but the rest are faster? Or keep using everything you have now?

Dude, I agree to lose at least 80% of them, most are useless and with bad UX on top of that. Even worse: they are distracting.

At some point hiring the programmers to pour software by the kilogram becomes a visible problem -- when the businessmen wake up to the fact that the amortised cost of a job sloppily done (say, over the course of the next 2 years) is much higher than investing 20-30% more upfront. That's what the article is arguing for, IMO.

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